GNU Christmas Gift: Free Eclipse 320
Mark Wielaard writes "Your friendly neighbourhood GNU did
it again. A year ago IBM made much noise
about placing $40 million of its software tools under a free software
license. Technically these tools, called Eclipse, are great for developing
(java) software. There was only one catch, it was build on top of the
proprietary java platform. This made it useless for the Free
Software community. Luckily the GNU project has two projects that come
to the rescue. GNU
Classpath, core libraries for java, and gcj, the GNU Compiler for Java.
We are now able to run Eclipse on a completely free platform! It is
not yet complete, but you can already edit, compile and browse CVS
with it. And since Eclipse uses GTK+ it also looks very nice. I setup
a page with
instructions on how to get this working so you can help us make
it work even better or just so you can view a couple of nice screenshots."
Free Software Community (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm.
Re:I'm glad... (Score:1, Insightful)
Whoopi (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, let's maybe stop making that ridiculous association between software, politics, the fate of humankind and the pursuit of life, liberty and freedom. It's just software. They're just computers.
Free: because everything else costs money and that sucks!
Running Eclipse with gcj/gij (Score:5, Insightful)
It is possible to run Eclipse with gcj since it comes with gij (GNU Interpreter for Java). It does take a little bit of work to get it running since you have to apply some patches to the latest gcj CVS verson. Hopefully the needed patches will make it into CVS soon. It is currently a bit slow (you will need a fast processor, 1Ghz+ recommended) and needs much memory (256MB recommended). And not everything will work yet (it sometimes hangs). But is already useful for gcj bug hunting and making pretty screenshots.
If you just want to know why gcj is so cool, please read: Compiling Java with GCJ by Per Bothner (Learn how gcj can not only be used to compile java programs, but also Scheme and XQuery to native code.) If you are interested in other Free Software running on top of gcj, please checkout RHUG setup by Anthony Green. (It contains precompiled binaries of things like Jakarta Tomcat, Ant, Rhino, Postgresql JDBC drivers, Jython, Xalan, Xerces, and much more.)
It took much effort to get this far with our free java platform. And I want to thank all GNU Classpath and gcj hackers for their years of hacking to make this possible. In particular I want to thank Tom Tromey the main libgcj maintainer for his guidance. And for being the first person to get to the Eclipse Welcome Screen, after all his hacking the rest was easy.
I should also mention Vincent Partington and Erwin Bolwidt for explaining why I should care about Eclipse and for their bughunting help last weekend. Please checkout their free software projects, Jaxup.
How you can help: If you write free java software make sure it works well on the GNU platform and if you like hacking on low level stuff help us make Classpath and gcj even better. And please consider to "Join us now and share the software".
The following pages explain how to patch gcj and setup Eclipse. And show some pretty screenshots of Eclipse in action.
What do you need
If you want to run it yourself you should be familiar with compiling gcj from source (either current mainline or the gcc-3_3-branch) and you will need to apply the following patches.
These patches (except the verify.cc change) should be applied to CVS soon so you might not need them.
Update: The following new patches are highly recommended.
That last patch will optimize classloading for Eclipse that doesn't need any natively compiled classes but should not be used for normal gcj usage. The other patches will hopefully make it into CVS soon.
Update: eclipse.patch [klomp.org] contains all the above patches plus a few tweaks for getting Eclipse to work better on the IKVM.NET VM [weblogs.com]. With all these patches applied I was able to open, edit and compile the Jaxup Java XML Update engine project from my friend Erwin Bolwidt inside Eclipse. The new screenshot looks nice.
When you have build and installed the new GCC you will need to make the following changes to the install.
Go inside the bin directory of the new GCC install and make a java symlink to the gij program. (Eclipse expects a binary called java, you can give the -vm gij option, but then it won't autodetect gcj as Standard VM.)
Copy the share/java/libgcj.jar file to lib/rt.jar. Then create a directory jre/lib/ and make another copy of the rt.jar here. (Note that these cannot be symlinks.)
Make a directory src and copy the gnu, java, javax and org directories from the libjava source directory in it. Then create a src.zip file which contains this src directory. Put this src.zip file in the parent directory of the dir you installed the new GCC in. So if you installed in
This is all needed because eclipse expects a tradition java environment. It should be easy to hack org/eclipse/jdt/internal/launching/StandardVMType
Update: The following is no longer needed with the latest patches.
Disable the garbage collector by export GC_DONT_GC=1. If you don't do this eclipse will not startup properly and you will find a stacktrace in the workspace/.metadata/.log file mentioning a InvocationTargetException caused by a NullPointerException.
Finally get the latest stable Eclipse build (you want the eclipse-SDK-M4-linux-gtk.zip.) It will create a directory eclipse and comes with all the sources (and a precompiled binary and the classes in jar files).
Running it
Make sure that the freshly compiled gij (and the java symlink) is in your path and that LD_LIBRARY_PATH points to the newly installed lib directory. Go inside the eclipse directory and you should be able to just type
This will take several minutes. If anything goes wrong start it with
After several minutes you will see the following welcome screen.
One of the first things you probably want to do is set the correct key bindings
Not everything will work as expected and sometimes you are greeted with the following dialog.Which is often because the garbage collector is disabled. My machine quickly gives up after eclipse has eaten more then 600MB.
Update: There used to be a screenshot here of the terminal window showing lots of Out Of Memory messages. But with all the new patches this does not happen anymore.
Re:Free Software Community (Score:2, Insightful)
I know I'm not the only Slashdotter who senses the irony of a community of people who supposedly stand for freedom declaring an entire platform to be useless because they find it politically unacceptable.
Re:Whoopi (Score:2, Insightful)
I can't believe that this totally idiotic troll got modded up to +4: Insightful! This project is the result of very talented and motivated coders and hackers doing to opposite of waiting for a product to be released. Therein lies the difference between a passive consumer and a real member of society. These folks were quite productive and have made tremendous steps towards a tool that the rest of us can benefit from. Yet an idiot like you bitches about it, and idiot moderators mod you up. Strange that the people doing things keep getting called zealots by those who oppose their actions solely because of the philosophy that motivates them.
Useless to RMS, maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
If you define the "Free Software community" as the zealotous 5% of free software users who refuse to use software that hasn't been blessed by RMS, you're right.
For the rest of us, Eclipse has been useful (and free and open source) for over a year.
Re:Whoopi (Score:3, Insightful)
We're always getting that mentality from the FSF -- that everything they build on is contemptible, and that they should be given complete, or at least vastly disproportionate, GNU/credit for everything they get their fingers into.
Re:Free Software Community (Score:2, Insightful)
Why must you slander us and belittle us?
"Politically unacceptable" is a poor substitute for "under a license that does not guarantee freedom from embracing and extending". It's not about politics, it's about learning a tool we can feel confident will continue to be around even if Microsoft buys Sun out in some dim future.
The platform is useless because the strings attached are too restrictive for those of us who think about the future of software development.
Radical fundamentalists would be the sort to smash the windows of Sun HQ or create cyber-havoc to achieve their political ends. You're smearing reasonable people who don't like Trojan gifts with a very broad brush, and I believe you owe us an apology.
Re:Keep the zealotry to yourself (Score:2, Insightful)
Take a look at a comparative analysis [genamics.com] of c# to java and c++.
some features I particularly liked: delegates (and resulting event support), properties and indexers, and collection management.
Perhaps you should look at the c# and
The point (Score:5, Insightful)
The point that so many have missed is that this shows how close the GNU implementations are to be being a complete JDK replacement. Eclipse is a very complex beast that uses nearly all of the Java APIs. This achievement shows the quality of the years of work that has gone into these free projects. All of this work is now finally ready to pay off.
Congratulations to the whole ClassPath and GCJ teams!
-Avery Regier
Re:Java on the client-side needs this to compete.. (Score:2, Insightful)
SWT library already does include GUI widgets/toolkit.
You are right though, saying that it is immature. We've been doing some serious development on SWT trying to convert full featured application from AWT to SWT. So far it's been going great.
However, here's a warning for all of you Java developers: there's quite a few things you still can't do. All Table work is a terrible hassle, there's no easy way of changing colors in single table cells and table functionality is very, very limited. We were able to improve some of that, but that actually ment implementing our own widgets for table. Anyways, it is pretty bad. Hopefully in 2.2 version (next year) they will solve some of the problems.
If anyone from Eclipse development community is reading, please, focus more not on the new features (cheat lists, wizards and stuff), but try to actually make SWT a reacher platform, there's a lot of work that needs to be done.
At the end, I wanted to summarize my opinion of SWT, which is not really what this topic is about. But here it goes: it is a great platform and a great concept (using native libraries and not drawing everything like Swing does). And you are correct - this will/could be Java's savior on the client. But anyone who would want to write a serious application in SWT should think twice before that, wheigh down all pros/cons and also try writing a prototype to make sure that it you can implement anything that you want.
One of the biggest innovations of SWT is a library called JFace, which hides a lot of basic/low level GUI functionality under an interface that is sort of a Model-View-Controller framework. This idea is brilliant, and this framework is just a pleasure to work with.
Anyways, enough with the rambling.. Happy Christmass, everybody!
I disagree in many respects (Score:4, Insightful)
"Microsoft and MFC rules on the client side (on Win32)".
MFC is dead, long live
"But now, Java needs to become a viable alternative to C++ based programming on the client-side."
Absolutely not. Java's only main competitor for Win32 client-side supremacy is VB.NET and C#.NET. C++/MFC is a dead-end.
On UNIX, I would suggest it's a toss-up between C++/Qt and C/GTK, and IMHO I think Java's more productive than either (though pre-1.4 X-windows Swing performance was unacceptable).
Sadly, this doesn't seem to be a battle that Java will win on Win32, even with SWT, for a couple of reasons. Microsoft has the industry's talent in developing high-performance Win32 GUI framewords, which will come out for
They also have the tools support with Visual Studio. The Java world currently has only *ONE* usable GUI building tool -- JBuilder. And that's not saying much. Eclipse won't have one for some time. The second major problem with Swing (besides performance) was this lack of tools support. I don't forsee a groundswell of tools support for SWT from multiple vendors.
Thirdly, there isn't a whole lot of impetus behind client-side "thick" GUIs in the industry. I don't foresee IBM throwing lots of money at making SWT general-use... the open source community will probably assist in this area, but I'm somewhat skeptical about how much adoption this will generate.
On the bright side, I'm not sure it really "matters". Windows peeps will write stuff with VB like they've always done, the C++'ers will switch to C# (they've really not much choice -- I worked at an MS shop as the Java junkie for 2 years, most C++/Windows programmers there took what MS has given them... there's a lot of shock and dismay when Borland/OWL is on one's resume). The 2nd most widely used GUI framework family will be (gasp) Carbon/Cocoa on Mac OS X. ANd rounding out the list, *nix peeps will continue head-butting between Qt and GTK+ (both of which are still gawdawfully ugly IMHO, quite apparent actually if you run a GTK+ app side-by-side with a Mac OS X application. But I digress).
"I can see them actually introducing more Java extension libraries for other things that Sun did a terrible job on. Collections. Better native threading model. Better I/O model. The list goes on and on."
Whoa, whoa! I disagree with each one of these. We are talking about J2SE 1.4, are we not? I'm quite happy with the collections framework (and I compare this to both stdc++ and the Smalltalk collections library), the java.nio.* package is very sophisticated, and IMHO the threading model is a matter of taste, not stemming from any particular technical disadvantage.
How Eclipse/SWT saved the GCJ project (Score:4, Insightful)
Compiling your application to a single binary (or
Java doesn't suck. Java's GUIs need not be slow. It was Swing that sucked. Finally people realize where to lay blame.
Sun - get rid of Swing once and for all! Swing is a poorly designed GUI tookit and a complete embarassment to Java.
Re:Now take Eclipse, please! (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh come on! At least SWT bindings for Linux and Solaris exist, they can exist in the first place, and you can assist in their development. How long do you think you would have to wait for Microsoft to release Linux and Solaris versions of the Windows Foundation Classes?
Re:Waste of Effort (Score:2, Insightful)
Basically, I think the effort of the Open Source community, of those that like Java, would be much pretty spent on making GCJ integrate seemlessly with a compliant Java VM using JNI.
I doubt that it would be practical. JNI does a lot of bookkeeping and is doomed to be far slower than whatever internal calling convention a JVM uses. You'd lose whatever advantages native compilation may have.
I hope developers would rather innovate and improve the java standard than to fork off a clone.
How can they innovate that for which they have no source code? The free implementation must come first. First they make it complete, then make it fast, then make it better.
Re:Free Software Community (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, come on. You do bring it on yourselves, don't you? All the high-minded talk of freedom and liberty just reeks of tall poppy syndrome. Even if your political goals weren't wrongheaded and your propaganda methods highly questionable, the "community" in general, and certain members of it in particular, think so much of themselves that being brought down a notch or two from time to time is good for them.
That said, though, let us not lose sight of the fact that your political goals are wrongheaded and your propaganda methods highly questionable.
"Politically unacceptable" is a poor substitute for "under a license that does not guarantee freedom from embracing and extending".
Actually, I think "politically unacceptable" describes the situation perfectly. Here we have a platform that is free for your use, without the sorts of BitKeeper-style restrictions that created such a stink a while back. The platform is ubiquitous and unrestricted, and generally considered to be appropriate for a wide variety of tasks. And yet you (you meaning the "community") refuse to use it for no other reason than that the people who built the platform do not subscribe to your views on intellectual property and source code licensing.
You may wrap it up in terms of "we want a tool that isn't under anybody's control," but the bottom line is that the concerns of the "community" aren't practical. They're ideological.
You're smearing reasonable people who don't like Trojan gifts with a very broad brush, and I believe you owe us an apology.
I am calling it like I see it. I don't think a reasonable person would conclude that Eclipse is "useless for the free software community" simply because it was built with and runs on Java. That is absolutely radical fundamentalism; it is based on the idea that anything that is not ideologically pure is "useless."
Now I didn't speak personally, and I intended no offense, but I will not be offering any apologies, either.
Re:Free Software Community (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, man. This could take days. But the short answer is that the FSF does not stand for freedom. They stand for strictly limited freedom. They stand for "freedom except." And yet they persist in calling it "free." That's deceptive. But I really have little to say to you on this specific part of the discussion that I haven't already said in this [slashdot.org] extremely lengthy and, surprisingly, civil thread. If you want to know what I think about the FSF and what they call "freedom," please click over and read what I wrote there.
The java platform is famously non-free, under the control of Sun rather than standards bodies.
You're kind of proving my point here, whether you realize it or not. You have called out the fact that Java is defined by a company instead of by a committee as being a sign that it is "non-free." That smacks of the "ideologically impure" thing I mentioned earlier. Because the Java specification is not defined by a committee, the Java platform is impure, so all software that runs on Java is impure. And because Eclipse runs on Java, it is "useless for the free software community." This is, as I said before, an example of radical ideological fundamentalism.
It's not Sun's views on IP we care about, it's the license under which the gift software is offered.
Okay, then for the purposes of our conversation I retract what I said about the FSF's disagreements with Sun over IP. Forget I said that.
What you are trying to do is smear the free software community (who concern themselves with providing free alternatives) with warez kiddiez who have no respect for laws they disagree with.
Wha? I don't understand how you jumped from what I said to that conclusion. I didn't say a thing about software piracy. If you're going to argue with me-- for I do love a spirited debate-- at least have the courtesy to disagree with things that I actually say, if you please.
We don't like the license so we won't use it. You are trying very hard to make this seem unreasonable, but it is not.
What I consider to be unreasonable is the apparent "fruit of a poisoned tree" doctrine that is being applied here. As I said before, Java is considered ideologically unacceptable-- this is a vital distinction; not unacceptable on technological or practical terms, but purely ideological ones-- so all software that runs on Java is also unacceptable.
It is possible to release software for the Java platform under the GPL. It is possible to build software with Eclipse and then release it under the GPL. So the objection here has absolutely nothing to do with the real world. It's purely ideological, and I consider that to be unreasonable.
Of course not, you're clearly not reasonable and have no idea what a reasonable person would care about.
Wow, this is getting better and better.
It's an attempt to make it sound like anyone who cares about what license their software uses sound like a terrorist.
Actually, it's an attempt to make it sound like anyone who considers a tool "useless" not because of its license, or because of the license of the platform on which it runs, but because of the specification of the platform on which it runs sound like a radical fundamentalist. Which is precisely what I said. If you jumped from "radical fundamentalist" to "terrorist," then I submit that you may have been watching too much television, and that you might want to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.
Ah, but now you have responded to my post personally, and accused me of 'radical fundamentalism' and an obsession with 'ideological purity', and I have taken it personally.
Well... okay. Yes. If the statement, "[The fact that] it was build on top of the proprietary Java platform... made it useless for the free software community," accurately describes your opinions, then yes, I am accusing you of radical fundamentalism. I am accusing you of being more concerned with ideology than with software, free or otherwise. Most importantly, I am accusing you of cutting off your own nose to spite your face.
If this offends you, I am sincerely sorry. I do not mean to attack your character, hurt your feelings, or insult your person. I mean only to indict your ideas in the court of Slashdot public opinion.
You are coming from the perspective that a little proprietary software is ok.
Actually, just to make things perfectly clear here, I am coming from the perspective that all proprietary software is okay. I disagree most wholeheartedly with the FSF's most fundamental assumption, which is that proprietary software, and by extension all intellectual property, is a bad thing. Just so there's no confusion about where I stand on the issues, you see.
But you seem to think that anyone who has a different perspective on the appropriateness of proprietary software is a raving lunatic, and for this I fault you and continue to demand an apology.
Whether you, sir, are a raving lunatic or not remains to be seen. You may fault me for whatever you like, and you may demand whatever you like. As I said before, no apology will be forthcoming.
Re:so what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's think about the possible scenarios here. You said that you predict Sun will either "crush the foundations of these projects" or "force compliance with some IP-ridden future standard." How could this come to pass?
If Sun has a patent that covers some core aspect of the Java runtime environment, then they could probably put a stop to the distribution of Classpath. If this is the case-- I have no idea whether Sun holds any such patents-- then they will be right to stop distribution of Classpath.
The same could theoretically be said about GCJ, but this seems much less likely. IBM has had their own Java compiler, Jikes, for some time, and Sun has shown no sign that they disapprove of this in the slightest.
So pretty much the only way that anybody could "crush the foundations of these projects" would be a patent action against the FSF over Classpath. But-- and this is critically important-- the same can be said of all FSF software. If anybody has a patent that covers anything the FSF has made, they could sue the FSF to stop distribution of that product. In fact, this dirty little secret is often used by those who oppose the FSF to cast doubt in the minds of potential users of the FSF's software. If it's FUD for them, it's FUD in this case, too.
What else could Sun do? Well, they could change the Java specification. In fact, they do this all the time. Java 1.4 is out, Java 1.5 is coming, and there will surely be another release of Java after that. Each one of these releases brings significant changes. The FSF will have no choice but to modify Classpath to keep up with Sun; that's a natural consequence of cloning somebody else's platform. So since this is inevitable, it's kinda silly to talk about it in terms of "crusing the foundations of these projects" as well. Sun will change the runtime specification, and Classpath will lag behind. It's the nature of the beast.
As for "forcing compliance with some IP-ridden future standard," I don't see how that could happen at all. The FSF isn't a licensee of Sun's, so Sun has no authority to try to force them to comply with anything.
Re:Useless to RMS, maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
This statement is heresy ONLY if you believe Free Software and RMS are synonymous. I believe they are not. Free Software existed well before RMS, and will exist well after he is gone. He only "created" Free Software if you accept his conceit that Free Software is only software that follows his definitions of Free [gnu.org]. I do not. He has contributed a lot to this world, but didn't invent the world. Many people don't realize that The Cathedral and the Bazaar [tuxedo.org] wasn't necessarily contrasting the development styles of commercial software vs. free software, but different styles of development within Free Software itself, and the RMS driven gcc was the example of the "closed" Cathedral. Because of the lack of innovation in gcc, especially around the time ANSI C++ came out and it needed large changes, folks forked gcc into egcs, a more "bazaar" style development model, that eventually became the offical gcc. Or are you saying Eric Raymond has nothing to say on the topic of Free Software because he differs with RMS?
Or if this was a troll, nevermind.
Re:Free Software Community (Score:3, Insightful)
I salute you in your effort to build a computer system that is free of the burden of licensed software. I don't really care about it, because it doesn't affect me at all, but I classify it alongside people who write web browsers in BASIC just to see if it's possible, and other frivolous pursuits.
Of course, as I said before, when the FSF comes along and starts misrepresenting their products, then I get testy. But that's a subject for a different rant entirely.
Re:Useless to RMS, maybe (Score:3, Insightful)